In February, a Philadelphia high school teacher was suspended because of a posting to her blog in which she complained that her students sometimes acted like "rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. " In May, a Florida high school football coach was fired for sending explicit pictures to his 20-year-old girlfriend. She was not a student. In August, a Florida high school's "Teacher of the Year" was fired for writing on Facebook outside school hours that he considered gay marriage to be a sin and same-sex unions a "cesspool.

The Federal Trade Commission pursued 11 advertising-program cases in fiscal 1985, including one in which it reached an agreement with Commodore Business Machines Inc., the big manufacturer of home computers, that the company would no longer advertise that its computers can run certain popular software programs unless they can do so at the time the claim is made.

As of April 30, 1,049 people in Orange County were known to have contracted AIDS. Of that number, 614 had died. For some, the despair associated with terminal illness is aggravated by the loss of their jobs, or the fear that they might lose them. Federal and state laws prohibit such discrimination against those with acquired immune deficiency syndrome--and also against those infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS--but the process of seeking redress can take so long that the patient can die before the case is heard.

The stunning dismissals of criminal cases against three former Broadcom Corp. executives in the last week focused on what the judge called "shameful" misconduct by prosecutors. But at the core, he had something more telling to say: Prosecutors couldn't prove the defendants did anything wrong. The Broadcom cases, among others, illustrate the struggles the U.S. attorney's office has encountered in prosecuting corporate executives for backdating stock options, a practice that makes it appear that their companies had fewer expenses and greater income than they really had. Among the most elusive elements in such cases, lawyers said, is proof that executives intended to commit a crime by backdating the options and conceal their actions.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court commissioner who made "discourteous, undignified, gratuitous and denigrating remarks" during family law cases was publicly admonished Tuesday by a state agency overseeing judges' discipline. The Commission on Judicial Performance determined that Commissioner Alan H. Friedenthal should be "severely publicly admonished" for misconduct, including "humor at the expense of litigants," during five cases over which he presided from June 2007 to January 2009, according to an 18-page order made public Tuesday.

Julius Chambers, a tenacious North Carolina civil rights lawyer whose house was bombed and office torched as a result of his advocacy, died Friday. The 76-year-old attorney, whose cases paved the way for public school integration in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area, had been in failing health for several months, his law firm said. Over the years, his opponents also set his car ablaze, along with his father's general store and garage business, but Chambers, known for his unflappable nature, persisted.

With the rest of Europe promising swifter cross-border cooperation against terrorists, lawmakers here voted Wednesday to make it harder for prosecutors to use evidence from other countries against criminal defendants in Italy.

Miranda Meza's biggest fear about going to the police was that the man she says molested her would lie. If he said he never touched her, how could she prove he did? But he'd made that part easy. He admitted to police that he had. Now they were both here, in the courthouse. She watched her grandfather across the lobby. He was nearly 80 years old, his hair white and sparse. He wore an oxygen tank strapped across his skinny chest. It had taken more than 16 years to get to this point.

There are a number of curious — and, in some ways, troubling — trends at work in the litigation record of the Los Angeles Police Department. This city's police officers appear to be abnormally litigious, suing their department at rates far higher than their counterparts in other big cities. Juries here seem inclined to dole out substantial awards, sometimes for relatively minor injuries: One motor officer whose demotion cost him $27,000 in lost income was awarded $1 million at trial.

A white police officer has been targeting Latino drivers for traffic stops because of their ethnicity, a Los Angeles Police Department investigation concluded — marking the first time the department has found that one of its officers had engaged in racial or ethnic profiling. For decades, the question of profiling — "biased policing," in LAPD vernacular — has bedeviled the department. Accusations that the practice was commonplace throughout the 1970s and '80s alienated the LAPD from the city's minority neighborhoods.